Year in review: The best games of 2009

Above: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Ain't no rest for the wicked awesome.

We're wrapping up our recap of the year that was. Today: the best games of 2009.

At last we come to it. You can click through to the feature on thephoenix.com to read the blurbs for each game, but for easy reference, and with all the usual caveats, here's my top 10 of 2009:

1. Borderlands
2. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
3. Batman: Arkham Asylum
4. Shadow Complex
5. Flower
6. Left 4 Dead 2
7. Red Faction: Guerrilla
8. Dead Space: Extraction
9. Street Fighter IV
10. Prototype

That concludes our coverage of 2009. We're not turning the lights out for the holidays here at Insult Swordfighting, but posting is likely to be light until the new year. As always, thank you for reading. Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!

Friday afternoon tidbits

I am in lovely St. Louis, MO, for the weekend. We're going to visit the Gateway Arch, catch a Cardinals game, and barbecue. Oh God, how we will barbecue. Unless my plane crashes, that is.

What a morbid way to start a links post.

-Hardcasual is always good, but every once in awhile they really knock it out of the park. Such is the case with "Professor Layton Solves Brain Teaser, Grisly Prostitute Murder." Amazing.

-Leigh Alexander makes a good point about how the leisurely exploration gameplay of Shadow Complex seems to be at odds with its ticking-timebomb storyline. There is a point, at least, at which your character determines that he's going to go back in, which I took to mean that he was planning to arm himself to the teeth before taking on the bad guys. Still, I did follow the blue line most of the time, and I was more than satisfied with how things played out.

-Nels Anderson makes a point I often try, and fail, to make: that "fun" is the wrong word for most video games. For some people, fun clearly is the objective, and there's nothing wrong with that. But many people are seeking more meaningful interactions with games, and for those people, fun's got nothing to do with it. The more kinds of experiences games can give us, the better.

-The passage of time has enabled some more sober looks at Grand Theft Auto IV. Still a great game, but it's hard to argue with the kinds of criticisms Sparky Clarkson makes. "For me, this is the defining flaw of GTA IV — so many of the missions, cutscenes, and incidental moments actively undermine the propositions the game is trying to sell you on." Paradoxically, the more choices a game gives you, the more obvious it is when the game makes decisions for you. I've never felt constrained in a Half-Life game, for instance, even though I'm just a puppet on a string.

All right, time to party with the St. Lunatics.

In praise of shade, complexity

Above: A different screenshot from Shadow Complex.

My review of Shadow Complex is up now at thephoenix.com. Despite yesterday's comments about Metacritic, you will not be surprised to learn that my score, and my sentiment, lands squarely in the mainstream. As a longtime Super Metroid fan, I'm quite happy to play a game that doesn't diverge too much -- okay, at all -- from that formula.

If this had come out between 1995 and 1999, it would have been a ripoff. If it had come out between 2000 and 2005, it would have been a relic. Today, it's retro!

Friday afternoon tidbits

Not sure how much time I'll have for games this weekend, but I plan to head back into the Shadow Complex and try to pad my completion stats a bit. I need infinite foam, damn it!

-Christian Nutt wrote a lengthy editorial about Shadow Complex and the Orson Scott Card question for Gamasutra, which is well worth your time to read, even though it doesn't have as many jokes as mine did. Take note of the comment by Peter David, the game's writer, who, understandably, is against a boycott:

I believe the answer to free speech is always more free speech. If you believe that Orson Scott Card is saying things that are wrong at the top of his lungs, then you say so at the top of yours. If he's donating money to organizations dedicated to infringing gay rights, you donate money to organizations that support them.

A society that embraces free expression depends on an unimpeded exchange of ideas.

The disconnect comes from those people who believe that boycotts are likewise a form of free expression. They're not. Boycotts are the opposite: They are designed to be punitive. To hurt someone financially.

I agree with the first part, but not so much with the second. I did not have a problem paying for this game. But choosing which companies you want to give your money to is a valuable tool in a citizen's arsenal, considering the structure of the society we live in. This almost gets close to suggesting that people should have to buy the game in order to express an opinion on Card's politics.

In fact, I do think that the conversation that has come up thanks to Shadow Complex has been a productive one, and that nobody at Chair or Epic is going be smarting financially, either.

-At Offworld, Jim Rossignol conducted a long interview with Valve's Chet Faliszek, mostly about Left 4 Dead 2, but also about the company, DLC, Steam, and much more. I appreciated how straightforward Faliszek was in responding to questions about topics like the fan boycott. He also sums up why Valve's games are always so good with this statment:

I've said this before, but when you first get people in to play your game you think: "Who are these morons? Can't they just see that's how it is supposed to work?" But you quickly learn: ten people in a row didn't figure that out, so the problem lies with us.

Creators of all types of content, not just video games, should consider the wisdom of that statement.

-While not a Madden guy myself, I really appreciate that the current generation of games includes free roster updates for things that happen after the game ships. For instance, you can download Brett Favre for the Vikings, and Michael Vick for the Eagles. The sports blog Deadspin has a little fun talking about Favre's player ratings.

-Speaking of Madden, Bill Harris's description of adjusting the game's sliders for maximum realism is essential reading. This is what engaging with a video game looks like.

-I was a bit surprised to read Matt Sakey call Far Cry 2 "a crime against gaming" in his monthly "Culture Clash" column. Sakey is a good writer who makes some excellent points here. Even in his original trashing of FC2, I can't argue with the factual accuracy of his observations. Yet his description of the game doesn't comport with my own experience at all.

When I think about Far Cry 2, I remember how dynamic and unpredictable every encounter was. I remember roaring across the savannah in a Jeep, taking my eyes off the road to consult the map on my knees as I bounced over hills and scraped against rocks. I remember scouting an outpost for five minutes, planning my assault with precision and care, only to have my weapon misfire and drop a hissing, smoking grenade at my feet. I remember these as things that I actually did, not as something that happened in a game. That's all I can ever ask.

-Lots of people, myself included, often complain about how game writing is missing its Lester Bangs. And while it's true that no game critic I'm aware of has achieved any mainstream recognition, this complaint does a disservice to the many writers who routinely produce excellent work. One of these is Jeremy Parish, whose Shadow Complex review is just fantastic: funny, insightful, surprising. If he's not getting the attention he deserves, it's not the mainstream's fault. It's ours, for not showing them what they're missing.

The violent hate speech of Shadow Complex

Above: Hateful, anti-robot bigotry.

Just kidding. There is no violent hate speech in Shadow Complex. But there has been some minor controversy around the game, due to its affiliation with science-fiction author Orson Scott Card. I should say up front that what little I know about Card is based on hearsay. I know Ender's Game is considered a classic in some circles. I know that he wrote some or all of the Insult Swordfighting lines in The Secret of Monkey Island, a debt I will never be able to repay. And I know that an awful lot of people I respect consider him a crackpot.

Card apparently has a history of borderline insane comments about homosexuality, abortion, and the dangers of liberalism. I have not read his book Empire, which created the universe in which Shadow Complex takes place, but my understanding is that it tells the tale of a second American civil war, in which the un-American bad guys are a far-left group called the Progressive Restoration. I got that from the Wikipedia entry, and am not qualified to comment further, except to note the irony of a conservative warning about the dangers of politically motivated violence from the left, considering the past 20 years or so of American history.

Shadow Complex sidesteps most of these concerns. Yes, the bad guys are still the Progressive Restoration, and probably want to institute mandatory abortion and recycling laws, but in practice they're your usual video game foes: faceless drones whose only talent seems to be dying in dramatic ways. We hear bits and pieces about their grand plan, usually as our hero, Jason Fleming, is sneaking through vents and overhearing their conversations. The dialogue is boilerplate evildoer stuff, no more plausible than the rantings of an old-school Bond villain. Despite the creators' use of Card as a publicity tool, his involvement was minimal.

The actual plot goes something like this:

-Boy loses girl
-Boy rescues girl, but
-Boy finds true love with high-tech armor and weaponry

Which is basically the same as every other video game ever made.

The Progressive Restoration plans to nuke the gay-friendly city of San Francisco first -- an odd choice for such a left-wing group, so long as Houston, Texas still stands. But if that's the extent of Card's homophobia coming to the fore, then I think I can live with that. Every city deserves a chance to be the terrorist target in a book, movie, or video game.

The content of Shadow Complex itself may not be the main concern. The real issue, as eloquently laid out by GayGamer's Dawdle, is whether we ought to be rewarding Card with our money. It's a tough one. We should be rewarding the people who made Shadow Complex, because it is fantastic. Plenty of people worked on this game who don't share his beliefs, including the game's real writer, Peter David.

If some fraction of our dollars ends up in Card's bank account, that may be the cost of doing business. I could try to stop patronizing any business that employed people whose politics I disagreed with, but then I would have to drop out of civilization altogether, move to a cabin in the woods, and write angry but lucid tracts about industrial society and its future.*

Dawdle's solution is pretty simple: If you're against what Card stands for, but for awesome video games, consider tossing a few bucks in the till of your favorite LGBT charity when you buy the game. Not a bad idea. But I'd like to think that we can have it both ways. We can use the sweetness of Shadow Complex as an opportunity to discuss great game design, and to remind the world that Orson Scott Card is a hateful homophobe. It's the best of both worlds.

The progressive restoration begins now, my brothers and sisters!

*In case you thought that I thought that there was no such thing as left-wing violence.